Firelands Current: A Digital Newspaper for Sandusky and the Firelands

A local paper has to work for two audiences. Readers need to find the stories, events, and conversations that matter to their town. Editors need to publish quickly, credit sources and photographers, and keep comment sections civil.

The paper also sells display advertising to local businesses, so ad placement, labeling, and inquiries had to be part of the platform from the start.

The visual identity draws on Lake Erie: a deep teal masthead, condensed headlines, and serif text for long reading. Pages are organized by section and by community, so a reader in Huron or Norwalk can go straight to their own coverage. On phones, the main navigation folds into a menu button in the masthead.

The public site and the newsroom behind it are one custom application.

• News sections and story pages with lead images, captioned photos, share links, and related coverage ranked by section and community
• A local events calendar with list and month views, community filters, and add-to-calendar files
• Talk of the Town, where every story and event gets its own discussion, plus threads that readers start themselves, with voting, nested replies, and member reports
• Reader accounts with email verification, public profiles, and author bylines that link to each writer's work
• Submit-news, contact, advertising, and report-an-inaccuracy forms, each protected by Cloudflare Turnstile
• Newsroom tools for stories, events, a credited media library, reader tips, corrections, moderation, businesses, and ads
• RSS and JSON feeds, an XML sitemap, and a Google News sitemap for stories from the last 48 hours

The site runs on Cloudflare Workers, with a D1 database for content and accounts and R2 storage for images. Staff roles control who can edit, publish, and moderate. Public posting is rate-limited.

• Event and story structured data so search engines can understand each page
• Security response headers, bounded request handling, and automated tests for every staff role and endpoint
• Google Analytics on public pages only, with staff traffic filtered out and no names, emails, or message text sent
• Published accessibility statement, skip links, and accessible form error summaries